A new multimedia platform promises to rescue the creative spirit of HyperCard and the classic MacOS look. This is Decker, an environment for creating and sharing interactive documents with sound, images, hypertext, and scripts.
According to the website beyondloom.com, Decker maintains the simplicity and ease of learning that made HyperCard famous, but adds modern improvements such as deep undo history, support for scroll wheels and touch screens, more modern keyboard navigation, and batch editing operations.
The platform is aimed at anyone: you can create E-Zines, organize notes, make presentations, build adventure games, or simply doodle pixel art in 1-bit. The ‘ditherpunk’ style is cozy, nostalgic, and offers fun creative constraints.
For more complex projects, Decker brings a scripting language called Lil. It is heavily influenced by Lua (an imperative language popular in game tools and engines) and by Q (a functional language from the APL family used in time-series databases). Lil is easy to learn and includes pleasant surprises like implicit scalar-vector arithmetic and an integrated query language similar to SQL.
Decker offers interactive widgets to build interfaces and allows defining new custom widgets. They can be copied and pasted using the system clipboard, making sharing easy. Each ‘deck’ is a kit of reusable parts.
The tool is command-line friendly: when compiled from source, it includes Lilt, a standalone Lil interpreter that can read, write, manipulate, and execute Decker documents ‘headlessly’. Lilt has even fewer dependencies than Decker and can be compiled as a cross-platform APE executable. Decks are stored in a line-oriented text format, compatible with Git and SVN.
Decker does not include ads, telemetry, gamification, or integration with ‘slop’ generators. It is free and open source software under the MIT license. The source code and bug tracker are on GitHub. Periodic binary releases for MacOS and Windows are available on Itch.io, which also has a community forum. The platform promotes themed ‘Game Jams’ in July and December; the next one will be the Decker Fantasy Camp in July 2026.